The “Kick-Ass” kids are growing up, and therein lies the deeply bruised heart of the new sequel to the controversial 2010 masked avenger movie.

“Kick-Ass 2” stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloe Grace Moretz are now 23 and 16, respectively. He’s fathered two children and she’s, well, 16.

While they play younger in the sequel, the film has clearly taken their advancing maturity into consideration, as Taylor-Johnson’s eponymous hero and Moretz’s Hit Girl, as well as their secret identities Dave Lizewski and Mindy Macready, face new moral and hormonal complications aplenty.

“It’s different because they’re dealing with other issues and really addressing where they’re at in their lives as characters,” Taylor-Johnson says in his perfect English accent.

“They’re all going through this adolescence thing and relating to others. In the first one, it was Dave really not fitting in anywhere and creating this alter ego, this perception of who he wanted to be. In this, it’s Kick-Ass discovering Dave Lizewski.

“And physically, Chloe, she’s so much older,” he adds. “How is she going to deal with high school, and is it easy for her? It’s not, because all she knows is how to kick the s— out of gangsters. You’d think that she’d know how to deal with popularity and girls in school, but she doesn’t. It’s funny because you see her so vulnerable and intimidated. It’s just those sort of dynamics that switch.”

Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., “Kick-Ass” told the story of how mild-mannered New York comic book fan Lizewski turned himself into a rather ridiculous costumed crime-fighter – then met the better-prepared Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), who had rigorously trained himself and his pre-teen daughter to do the same.

That film’s director, Matthew Vaughn, could not return for the sequel, but put it in the capable hands of writer-director Jeff Wadlow (“Never Back Down”). If anything, Wadlow has made an even more scathing satire of superhero movies and the vigilante impulse that fires them while retaining the original’s rough humor and graphic violence and language – while giving the endeavor richer characters and, like we’ve said, even more heart.

“It’s such an interesting character in general, but to see her grow up and really change as a person was really interesting to watch happening,” notes Moretz who, with her father gone, now has to give up the life she’s known and act like a regular teenager under the loving foster care of her dad’s old police partner, Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut), in the film.

“Jeff did a really good job with the sequel, and it does go a lot deeper emotionally. It definitely goes more into who they really are, who are the people behind the masks. We never really saw that with Hit Girl in the first one.”

Moretz had to walk a fine line, though, between staying true to Hit Girl’s foulmouthed, mercilessly violent nature and Mindy’s strange new experience of getting picked on by mean girls.

“It’s growing up with her, but also keeping her linear with the first film,” Moretz explains. “The thing with a second film is, you want to try all this new stuff and change stuff up, but at the same time you’ve already created the character and people know her. So I can change it a little bit, but I can’t completely flip it.”

The first movie caused quite a stir with its depictions of the then-11-year-old Moretz cussing up a storm and gleefully slicing up adult male criminals twice her size – and getting pretty brutalized in return. Teenage Chloe does more of the same this time around and, as in the past, makes no apologies for it.

“When I sign onto a movie, I know the script, I know exactly what I’m going to do,” she says. “So I never have any problems with my roles because I would never film a movie that I didn’t fully support. That’s how I feel with all my roles.

“Some of them are very controversial, but I don’t purposely pick a role to be controversial. I do it because it’s fun for an actor to try different things. People get different things from different movies, but I just do it because it’s fun and it’s different from what I live on a daily basis, which is a normal life.”

So far, the major complaint about “Kick-Ass 2” has come from a surprising source: one of its co-stars, Jim Carrey.

He plays Colonel Stars and Stripes, the slightly psycho leader of a group of costumed crime-fighters inspired by Kick-Ass, who eventually joins the justice-dispensing league. A vocal advocate of gun control since last December’s Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre, Carrey has expressed regret for the violence in “Kick-Ass 2” and has refused to help promote the film.

“He didn’t disavow it,” Taylor-Johnson points out. “He just said he had a change of heart. He’s entitled to his opinion.

“I so enjoyed working with Jim,” Taylor-Johnson adds. “He’s so enthusiastic, and he brings that mad kookiness that Nic Cage had in the first one. He had thousands of ideas, and he improvised and made us all laugh. This is a guy that’s just full of passion, and you admire that.”

Ironically, “Kick-Ass 2” comes off as an indicting critique of the bonehead violence it plays for shock and laughs, not to mention as a slap in the face to the superhero movie genre that is currently dominating commercial American filmmaking.

“Kick-Ass really deals with what the consequences are when it comes to violence,” Taylor-Johnson observes. “Generally, it’s never good. You go looking for trouble, you’re going to end up in trouble, and that’s what he’s coming to terms with.”

“I think ‘Kick-Ass’ is kind of the opposite of a comic book movie, yet at the same time it’s the real version of a comic book movie,” Moretz reckons. “It’s anti-superhero, in a way. The message in the first one is that a kid dresses up in a silly costume and then he realizes that the world isn’t a comic book.

“In the second one, we show that you reap what you sow,” she continues. “If you’re a bad guy, bad things are going to come to you. But also, if you’re a good guy, you’re hurting real people, beating them up and killing them – and you’re saving real lives. It’s the realism within the second movie that really turns it around and shows a different side of what Kick-Ass is.”

Bob Straus has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.

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